Posts by David Eric Tomlinson

A generous review of THE MIDNIGHT MAN in today’s The Sunday Oklahoman: “Tomlinson … weaves a fictional portrayal of five diverse Oklahomans in an ambitious novel about overcoming racial, social and political differences.” Read the full review here.

A wonderful, insightful review in today’s The Dallas Morning News discusses my debut novel THE MIDNIGHT MAN in relation to the deep-seated political divide resulting from this year’s election: “Tomlinson has nice timing, and a good handle on voice … The characters are nicely fleshed out – real human beings with flaws that never lapse into cartoon two-dimensionality. It’s a book about hope, which comes at a good time. After last year’s polarizing election, it feels good to see through the eyes of his creations — people who are really interested in understanding one another’s lives as opposed to just…

On Friday, November 6, I gave the keynote address at the annual meeting of the Oklahoma Sociological Association, at the University of Oklahoma. The talk concerned recent research I conducted into the death penalty, while writing my first novel The Midnight Man. Below is the full text of that speech. Oklahoma Sociological Association Keynote November 6, 2015 Hello everybody. Thanks for having me. My name is David Tomlinson. I was born in Stillwater, which pretty much doomed me to life as an Oklahoma State fan, and grew up in the town of Perry, about fifteen minutes from there. I’ve lived…

In the first pages of Carmen Boullosa’s powerful yet whimsical novel Texas: The Great Theft, we are introduced to dozens of characters – butchers and lawyers and chicken dealers and grocers and judges and escaped slaves and housemaids and vaqueros, Mexicans and Americans and Indians and Africans and Germans – everyone trying to survive in the precarious, often violent territory between the Rio Bravo and Nueces rivers. It’s a place bursting with stories, a place where every perspective – no matter how small or marginalized – has something to add to the conversation. The story begins with an insult. It’s…

Dallas native Joe Milazzo’s new novel Crepuscule w/Nellie is an inspired work of art, a “speculative historical fiction” twenty years in the making, and the book deserves a wider audience than it will get. Titled after the jazz standard of the same name – a song composed by the famously idiosyncratic pianist Thelonious Monk, while his wife Nellie was undergoing treatment for a thyroid disorder – the novel imagines itself into the uncomfortable love and economic triangle existing between Monk, Nellie, and their benefactor, the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter. The story is, like Monk’s work, unique – strange, dissonant, profane,…